... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 33) Summer 1997 Last | Contents | Next Issue 33 The CIA and Drugs One of the biggest stories in the six months since the last Lobster has been the CIA-deals-crack story. The Web site at ciadrugs@mars.galstar.com has an enormous amount of information, including an important piece by Robert Parry, 'Lost History: Contras, Dirty Money and the CIA. ' Another important background piece is Jack Blum's testimony to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last year, which is reproduced in Covert Action Quarterly no. 59. However, in my opinion the two best pieces ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 30) December 1995 Last | Contents | Next Issue 30 Persian Drugs: Oliver North, the DEA and Covert Operations in the Mideast Jonathan Marshall 'Rug merchants' was the epithet former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan used to describe the Iranians who negotiated secret arms deals for nearly a year with senior officials of the Reagan Administration, including Oliver North of the National Security Council. Regan's dismissive characterization hardly did justice to the sales skills of North's Mideast contacts. 'It was a brutal, ugly story, ' said the CIA's chief operations officer, Clair George. 'People were selling information, selling hostages ...

... a slap-happy attempt to discredit the anti-War movement by showing that Ellsberg was mentally deranged. Icon McCoy became a celebrity in 1972 with the publication of his pioneering book, The Politics of Heroin In Southeast Asia. Since then McCoy's book and its sequel have provided critical researchers with a compass for charting the CIA's involvement in international drug trafficking. But somewhere between The Pentagon Papers and The Politics of Heroin is a vast discrepancy - a disturbing clash of facts from which only one icon can emerge with his status fully intact. Ellsberg's perilous peccadilloes Ellsberg was not always a pacifist 'dove' intent on ending the Vietnam War. On the contrary, at first he was an ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 33) Summer 1997 Last | Contents | Next Issue 33 Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media Daniel Brandt and Steve Badrich See note(1 ) Like some Russian high official come to treat with Chechen rebels, CIA Director John Deutch arrived in force -- by heavily-armed motorcade, and with helicopter cover. SWAT teams swarmed over the building that was Deutch's destination. But on November 15, 1996, Deutch's destination was in fact only the auditorium of Locke High School in the beleaguered South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles: for a U.S . public servant, ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 38) Winter 1999 Last | Contents | Next Issue 38 Drugging America: a Trojan Horse Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, PO Box 5, Alamo, CA 94507, USA $28 plus $4 shipping in the US. Outside the US inquire first at 1-800-247-7389 (phone) 925- 295-1203 (fax) This is the successor to Stich's Defrauding America, reviewed in Lobster 34 . As with the earlier work, it is impossible to verify and difficult to even assess many of the claims made by Stich's informants; but even if only part of it ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 46) Winter 2003 Last | Contents | Next Issue 46 Drugs, oil and war Peter Dale Scott Oxford (UK) and New York : Rowman and Littlefield Inc; 2003, $22.95, p/b On the left-hand page facing his first page of text Scott gives us two definitions of deep politics, the concept he introduced which succeeded his earlier concept of parapolitics. deep politics: 'all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged. ' deep politics: 'the immersion of public political life in an immobilising substratum of unspeakable ...

... the other. There is no such thing as a truly lone wolf. In Wolf, Valentine records the story of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and its origin in the internal security policies of the US government at the beginning of WWI. The demise of the FBN in 1968 coincided with an interregnum in which the so-called war on drugs was managed or mismanaged just like the war in Vietnam with which it was intricately connected. Richard Nixon's attempt to recover US control in Southeast Asia and establish political hegemony at home coincided with creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency charged with continuing the US government's pursuit of international narcotics trafficking and policing of the global drug trade. ...

... with his news stories linking the CIA and the Nicaraguan Contras to the rise of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles and elsewhere. His gripping new book, richly researched and documented, deserves an even wider audience and discussion. The book profits from corroborating CIA and police records that have been released in response to his stories. Documents from a drug raid in October 1986 show that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had already stumbled upon the substance of Webb's charges about Nicaraguan drug trafficker Daniel Blandon a full 10 years before Webb's account was published in the San Jose Mercury News. One sheriff's department document reported that 'the Blandon organization is believed to be moving hundreds of kilos of cocaine a ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 24) December 1992 Last | Contents | Next Issue 24 Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall University of California Press, Cambridge (UK) 1991, 8.95. The basic rule of politics, domestic and international is that my enemy's enemy is my friend. That rule ensured that the CIA adopted as allies the opium growers of the Golden Triangle in the 1960s and 70s, and the heroin producing mujahadeen of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 80s. The ostensible 'enemy' was communism in one guise or another. But if you look ...

... its ambitions, more tightly focused, the unattributable assertions more thoroughly supported by (potentially) checkable material. Her thesis, and the book, is in two sections. In the first she takes the reader through the stages of her discovery that Agca was an agent/employee of the so-called Turkish Mafia. Heavily involved in the drugs/guns network in that part of the world, this Mafia has extensive links both to European neo-fascists and to the Turkish Gray Wolves. Agca had links to the latter, though Ms Sterling (and Henze) are at pains to convince us that Agca was not a fascist: 'With them but not of them' is ...